On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:37 PM, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I actually find that to be a plus - there's no distracting variance
> that artificially makes things "different" that don't need to be.
>
>
I just thought of an amusing analogy. To me, reading Lisp takes more
mental effort in the same way that it takes more mental effort to follow
someone who is speaking in monotone (precisely because there is "no
distracting variance").
The main reason I spoke up was because of the comment in the thread
suggesting that readability is purely a function of what kind of syntax you
are most used to seeing. Many people tend to assume that if you don't like
the way Lisp looks, you just haven't been using it long enough. I wanted
to offer a counterexample, as someone who has spent over 20 years reading
Lispy code. I prefer to *write* Clojure, but I prefer to *read* Python.
If I can find a language that I enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing,
that would be nirvana. That's why the original post for this thread caught
my eye, and struck me as worthy of discussion. I know Rich has mentioned
that he admires Python's concision, so it seems reasonable to compare and
contrast their readability.
It is worth noting that Clojure does have several things that elevate it
over other Scheme/Lisps in terms of readability. The use of [] for vectors
and {} for maps is a huge help. The ability to add commas anywhere you
want is nice. The removal of extra parens from let is nice (I'm less keen
on the removal of extra parens from cond because of the awkwardness that
results when the test and answer are too big to fit on the same line).
Short names for most of the built-in functions are also nice.
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